Tag Archives: cost

Uruguay has now deployed over 500,000 XOs to students from 1st to 9th grade, since 2007. This includes a nationwide laptop deployment, a nationwide wifi rollout, teacher training, material development, and maintenance & repairs.

They note a number of beneficial side effects:
* 15,000 unregistered students were registered
* roughly 1/4 of parents are getting connected through their students laptops

Rabi Karmacharya runs OLE Nepal, the local team in charge of implementing the current project in Nepal (with 2100 children and teachers at 26 schools). Today he posted an estimate of the total cost of their XO project — $77 per child per year. This includes network connectivity, school infrastruture, teacher training, repair, content creation, and administrative overhead for the project.

Rabi notes that many of these (connectivity, training, overhead) are fixed costs that go down with scale, and content creation is largely a one-time cost that they benefits all schools. And this project is still a pilot — less than 0.1% of the country’s primary school-age children. Other interesting details: their annual repair cost for the first year was just 2.5% – children and families are extremely careful with their laptops; something we have also observed in other Asian countries.

It’s tremendously useful to see this level of detail in shared data and experiences; thanks to the team for publishing it! They also publish an amazing country coverage map showing every school taking part in the project, with data about each one.

I hope to also see more of this school-level sharing of data and experiences, from environment and power considerations, to usage rates and general feedback, to published creative work of the students!